Aristotle Peripatetic

Has anyone watched “Outpost?” It’s a great military horror film. #militaryhorror #horror

Watching Bodycam; a found footage horror film. I’m a sucker for this genre. However, it needs to divest itself of the tropes of regular horror; namely, that radio comms, or any comms, fail as the drama begins. Why would comms fail if they worked 5 minutes previously? I get that horror needs to isolate protagonists, but in the 21st century, with Starlink and iPhones, and Satellite Comms, and tactical radio comms…please…it’s getting really hard to have people isolated, regardless of rural environments. New tropes need to come forth. No supernatural event is going to thwart the physical power and technological power of a SWAT team or Delta or SEAL Team 6. Actually, let’s add in any military or police. Armed, trained humans are not fodder for lazy story writing. Read history…that’s not how shit works. Trained men, whether military or first responders, get shit done, and they’ve the tech to back them up. The spiritual battle is much more difficult, but please stop with comms work fine til you enter the haunted house, or even the woods, given global communications tech. It’s just not believable anymore. Something new needs to come into play to isolate victims/protagonists.

I was at an exercise called Millennium Challenge 02. Many of you won’t know what I’m talking about. But please listen as I explain. I was a junior Intelligence Officer (LTjg) sent TAD off ship to the Joint Warfighting Center, Suffolk Va to participate. I was assigned to Blue Forces, led by Army Three Star BB Bell, who was Blue Forces Commander. I was placed in the Joint Intelligence Center, run by Bell’s Army Intel team, a LtCol and a Major serving as director and deputy director of the JIC. They were really cool guys; out of Ft Hood as I recall. BB Bell wore these awesome tanker boots. I was placed as Navy Intel section leader. We had all the services’ intelligence types in the JIC, mostly junior, and only a few of us officers, but it worked. Marine General Van Riper was OPFOR (Red Cell) commander. I don’t recall if he was retired by that point. We had all these computerized tools with global real time reach (a novel thing back then) wherein exercise participants were literally spread all over the world, not just put in a building in Suffolk…Network Centric Warfare showcased. I recall Helos landing at the JWC as members of congress arrived to observe. Then the war game began. Shortly thereafter we lost a shitload of major surface combatants including big deck amphibs and a Carrier, just to begin with. Van Riper used swarm tactics and small boats with short range cruise missiles in addition to shore launched missiles, and motorcycle message carriers to avoid electronic comms. I’ll never forget the moment as we sat there in stunned silence. The Army Intel Major addressed me by name in front of the whole JIC: “What the fuck just happened to the Navy?” I had no answer. I remember looking at the incoming Intel traffic in disbelief. I think eventually I muttered something to the effect: “we are out of the fight it appears.” Then, after a day or so, I think, we got a great big do over. 🤦🏻‍♂️ Lo and behold, we won! What a crock. Van Riper subsequently quit as Red Team lead, and I believe he even wrote a piece explaining the cluster fuck that was MC02 in the Virginia Pilot. Afterward, I found myself, after a stint at GITMO, assigned to the Naval Information Warfare Activity. More Network Centric Warfare; damn that term sounds so ancient now. After a subsequent tour in Europe, I found myself assigned as a LCDR to 5th FLT as an intelligence officer. My first mission was chasing Somali Pirates as part of CTF 151. This is where MC02 came in handy. Powerful radars onboard awesome ships USS CHOSIN and USS ANZIO weren’t finding pirate skiffs, particularly the ones that could go out for well over a thousand miles to attack shipping lanes. I’d seen the challenge of trying to find small boats in open water. I recommended sticking close to the shipping lanes and waiting for these pirates to come to us. MC02 taught me to act like Army Cav in the 19th century; you want to protect settlers going west, stick to the wagon trains and don’t waste time riding all over the countryside trying to find war parties you’ll not find. After that, once I got to HQ in Bahrain, we had one primary adversary. Later, after my retirement, I spent about 7-8 yrs as a senior civilian analyst focused on that same adversary at ONI. The bitter lessons of MC02 never left me, so it’s bittersweet for me to see this go down after I’ve hung up my hat. I’m overjoyed, however, to see that we’ve taken the humiliation of MC02 to heart, and not played into the type of war Iran expected of us.

I’ve a question for @johnkonrad and @mercoglianos I was just listening to Gordon Lightfoot’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. Great song! Tragic! Was the Captain of that ship a Kings Point grad, or Mass Maritime, or some other maritime college? How are Great Lakes sailors different from international sailors? Is there a different pipeline? What might draw a merchant sailor to the Great Lakes rather than global routes? It appears Great Lakes can be as dangerous as the oceans!